It’s a much nicer signature than just “X support team” with no face or name attached, no? Brownie points for the adorable puppy.

By introducing yourself to the customer and using your name as well as showing your face, you make things personal and begin to frame the interaction as one between people, versus one between a customer and a nameless, faceless business.

Customer Service Email Tip 2:Say “Thank You”

You may not think of it this way, but a customer who provides constructive feedback—or even flat out complains about something— is giving you a very valuable gift.

A survey by Lee Resources International found that in the average medium-sized business, for every customer who complains, there are 26 who never say a word—they simply leave.

Every customer who complains is giving you an opportunity to fix something that can potentially help you retain 26 other customers.

That’s a big gift.

Simply saying “thank you” to a customer can be a powerful way to strengthen your relationship with them.

Receiving gratitude doesn’t just change the way we think and feel; it changes the way we behave for the better.

Did they give you feedback? Say “thank you”. Did they report a bug? Say “thank you”. Did they complain about something? Say “thank you”.

Make sure your customer knows how much you appreciate their email, no matter what the tone or contents of it are.

Customer Service Email Tip 3:Define Your Support Style

As long as you eventually end up solving the issue, style doesn’t really matter in customer service emails, right? Wrong.

The whole point of customer support is to successfully communicate information that allows either you or your customer to solve a problem.

Bad writing, formatting and even using the wrong tone make that communication hard to understand.

There are several elements that you should consider and go over with your whole team to make sure your customer support style is what you want it to be, including:

Agreeing on certain rules, reference points and values in your customer support process—basically, putting together a simple customer service style guide—will help everyone doing support in your company be faster and more efficient at it.

People who were given the bad news first were more likely to feel better about what they were told, while people who were given the bad news last were more motivated to act on the news.

That means that the right way to deliver good and bad news depends on the context.

In customer service, we generally want our customers to be happier, so it’s a good idea to lead with the bad news.

For example, if you’re delivering bad news that a feature they requested won’t be built, lead with that:

I’m really sorry that we won’t be able to get this on our product roadmap anytime soon. The good news is that there is a workaround. Here’s how you do it…

But if you need to persuade the customer to act, then start with the good news.

Great news! That feature already exists. To access it, just upgrade to the Pro plan by clicking here…

Next time you need to deliver both good and bad news to a customer, think about the context; the order you choose matters.

Customer Service Email Tip 5:Use Canned Replies

While speed isn’t the most important thing in customer service, it does matter.

There are a lot of interactions that start repeating themselves, and having a quick way to get back to the people with common issues can save your support reps tons of time—we’re talking about automation.

Most people assume that customer service automation is about replacing, or minimizing, human-to-human interaction. That’s not the goal of support automation at all.

As long as you still put effort into making your common replies personal, they can be a huge time saver, whether it’s a feature of your help desk software or using a simple text expander tool.